The editorial board of the Washington Post published a bombshell report Tuesday, saying that the “inner circle” of President Joe Biden “worked to conceal his decline.”
Those words were written in a piece that was celebrating Biden’s choice last month to step aside from his re-election bid. All of this comes as the Democratic National Convention kicked off this week to officially nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s 2024 nominee.
Many people suggested that Biden step aside for quite some time, but he only did so after intense pressure picked up within the party following his disastrous performance at the first presidential debate earlier in the summer.
Officials with the White House, and Biden himself, have all insisted that the president was still of sound mind and very capable of serving as president for four more years.
The Post’s piece this week praised Biden, almost nonsensically, saying his “willingness to surrender power deserves special recognition.”
Yet, very early on in the article, they wrote of the president:
“The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline.
“He and the country would have been better off if Mr. Biden had kept his implied promise from the 2020 campaign to be a ‘transitional’ figure, perhaps by bowing out after the Democrats’ surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections.”
Many left-wing media outlets defended Biden for much of this year, even as signs of his decline were coming to the forefront. The Wall Street Journal issued a report about Biden slipping up in private, which the White House exploded over.
Jennifer Rubin, a left-wing columnist for the Post, went off in a June 9 piece that the Journal’s piece was “shoddy,” as Biden is still plenty fit to be the leader of the country.
Aaron Blake, a senior reporter for the paper, even wrote in advance of the first presidential debate that the piece in the Journal “set off a new round of teeth-gnashing about coverage of President Biden’s age,” questioning why GOP nominee Donald Trump doesn’t have to face the same questions about how old he is.
Only six weeks after that, though, Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
That all happened following Biden’s horrific performance at that debate, which put on display for the whole world to see just how bad a shape Biden was in. Even some of his biggest supporters in the media and in his own party started to turn on him, calling for the president to not run for re-election.
Only a few days after he said he wouldn’t be stepping down, Biden did so, and then immediately endorsed Harris to take his place.
The whole ordeal is fishy, to say the least. The timing of Biden stepping aside meant Harris was basically the only Democrat who could step in for him, since she was the only one with a campaign already in place and the public notoriety.
If Biden had never run for re-election in the first place, or had dropped out of the race early, it’s likely that Harris would have faced challenges from other rising Democrats, and it’s not a sure thing that she would’ve won the party’s primary.
